(Director’s note: Walt Hunter, author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019) and co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham UP, 2017), is an associate professor of World Literature and associate chair of Clemson English. Current events have him thinking about this moment in history, our moment in history, and our relationship to it.)
Social scientists and economists have singled out 1973 as a pivotal year in the history of global capitalism—the end of the post-war, Bretton Woods model of “embedded liberalism” and the beginning of the “long downturn”—but could the humanities add something new to this narrative? I’m interested in the cultural shifts in literature and art in the early 1970s that coincide with the end of what the French call the trente glorieuses, the years before the current period of globalization and of dramatically increased inequality.
One of the relatively minor, and yet, for me, ultimately illuminating events of 1973 is the publication of a book of sonnets by Robert Lowell called History (1973). In 1969 Lowell had published many of these sonnets in a collection called Notebook (1969) that, four years and two editions later, became History. “I am learning to live in history,” Lowell writes in the second edition of the fifth poem of a twelve-part sonnet sequence called “Mexico.” “What is history? What you cannot touch.”
Lowell’s reflection in this particular poem is prompted by the passing of the end of the day: the “full sun,” the “silhouetting sunset,” then the “undimmed lights of the passing car.” Typical of Lowell’s sonnets, the intimacy of personal experience occasions a reflection on large-scale processes: though he’s often received as a confessional poet, Lowell’s style in fact reflects his globalized present. The question “what is history?” comes to life as part of a larger American cultural, historical, political, and economic predicament in the early 70s.
Admittedly, the sonnet is probably not the first cultural form that springs to mind when we think about the late 1960s and early 1970s. 1973 was not a marquee year for the sonnet—though it was for Gravity’s Rainbow, Dark Side of the Moon, “Killing Me Softly,” The Exorcist, “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,” Badlands, Linda Ronstadt, and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” This list has very little in common except a vague sense that something was over and it was now, as Joan Didion writes, the “morning after the 60s.” Americans in the early 1970s suspect that time is out of joint, that their lives fit into their country and their country fits in the world in a different way.
I take Lowell’s comment seriously: what is it to “learn to live in history” and how can a sonnet, of all things, help do that? Whose history is he talking about, this white scion of a patrician New England family? Why is history “what you cannot touch”?
One of the sonnet’s oldest motifs is noli me tangere—literally, “don’t touch me”—which appears in Thomas Wyatt’s mid-sixteenth-century sonnet “Whoso List to Hunt.” The sonnet’s noli me tangere, a phrase Wyatt borrows from the Latin Vulgate, is figured by Wyatt and later sonneteers as the gendered body. Its perspective is one of suspended or thwarted desire—usually, though not always, rooted in a male gaze. The sonnet man is probably a close cousin to the “longing man,” as Merve Emre describes this enduringly odious figure.
But in Notebook, history becomes the object of the sonnet instead. In this way, Lowell speaks quite clearly to the present, his and ours. Living with the “I” in history remains, perhaps, one of the most intractable questions for the United States in 2020. Later, Claudia Rankine will write this through in a different way, while nodding at Lowell: “drag that first person out of the social death of history,” she writes in Citizen: An American Lyric, “then we’re kin.”
The sonnet is not a form in which history lives comfortably. It’s a pretty room or a narrow cell, the place where poets argue with themselves. The schematic grace of the sonnet allows for two positions to be reconciled, or to be held in tension. And the sonnet’s closure, if it comes, is not the closure of an event, but the closure of logic or rhyme. When something happens in the sonnet, it is often a product of the energy created by the poem’s own forces, married to the poet’s thoughts and feelings. While the sonnet sequence might elaborate the emotional conditions in which an “I” is forged, we leave it to Tasso’s ottava rima stanza or Milton’s blank verse to provide the historical sweep.
So when Lowell writes a sonnet, he already knows that it’s not going to accommodate historical narratives very easily—which makes the sonnet’s aversion to history perfectly compatible with its history of adversion. But there’s also something about history itself which, for Lowell, is untouchable, even though he must learn to live in it.
Writing a sonnet can require some grappling with the long and cumbrous European history of the poetic form itself. Traveling to English from Italian, the sonnet loosens up dramatically in English, which lacks the availability of Italian rhymes. Sonnets by Wyatt, Wroth, Wordsworth, Meredith, Frost, McKay, and Brooks are closer to the language as it’s spoken than sonnets by Dante or Petrarch. The sonnet always arrives, in other words, with a lot of baggage—not the least of which is its co-emergence with early modern capitalism and colonialism in Europe.
Lowell struggles with the sonnet’s grandiosity, flattening its music out and grounding its images in material from “the abundance of reality.” He puts it this way at the of Notebook (1970):
My meter, fourteen-line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and
elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose. Even with this
license, I fear I have failed to avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet.
I have been thinking so far about the sonnet as a way of dramatizing Lowell’s discomfort with making history while learning to live in it. This is a predicament that, I think, is only more pressing for US artists today. Given the US influence in remaking the world within its own global framework, how can one shape that history from a position that is effectively inside it, complicit with it, part of its continuation? For Lowell, the sonnet, with its own elaborate history in poetry, becomes a convenient vehicle on which the poet can displace his anxiety about his position and privilege in American history.
For the humanities, grappling with the history of poetry can be an effective way of studying history writ large. So one question that came to me as I was writing this piece was not what the true facts are, but what the right forms might be. This could be the question that animates Rankine’s Citizen, too, as it situates everyday moments of racism within its “American lyric,” and Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, a sequence of 70 sonnets written immediately after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. To “touch” history might be to possess it, as a new national myth; it might be to touch it up, as an old national lie. But the process of learning to live in history, to deal with what happened honestly, is to embrace one’s own role—not in remaking the past, but in continuing to make a future.